Raid Leading 101: Maximizing DPS Uptime

Normally, most bosses are kept still. There’s a cleave effect or some other ability which makes it difficult for tanks to herd them around. Every so often, a boss comes along where even though it isn’t necessary to move them, it can sometimes be extremely beneficial. In this week’s Raid Leading 101 post, I want to highlight a little trick that Conquest used during our first kill of Professor Putricide. It’s a really minor adjustment that our raid leader came up with and looking back now, I almost wish I had thought of it first. Who knew something so simple and minor would’ve helped out so much?

Initially, we had a DPS problem. We were having a difficult time burying slimes and phasing Putricide within a timely fashion. We were rocking six healers at the time. The raid was taking obscene amounts of damage and many players were struggling with avoidable damage. I myself hit a streak where I went 9 consecutive attempts being hit by Malleable Goo on the same night. That’s some serious tunnel vision going on.

If we downgraded to five, we’d solve our DPS issue but our stressed healers were going to be stressed even further. We found a way to help resolve these issues and it’s nothing to do with player substitution or gear. It was all due in part to improved movement and positioning.

If I may make a suggestion on putricide… after the green ooze dies you waste a lot of time moving all the way to the other side of the room. Just have everyone move to the center. Ranged can dps the gas cloud as soon as it spawns and then melee can quickly switch after it targets someone. This also makes it easier to run back into the orange corner for the green ooze.

We’ve actually been doing that for a while, but I wanted to elaborate on that further and illustrate how we tackle it.

The orange ooze

We’ll use the Professor Putricide example.

When the orange ooze was active, we used to tank Putricide on the far right very close to the green wall. Our melee DPS had to run the length of the room to open up on the orange ooze when it fixated on a target. It was during these parts of the fight that we were able to close the gap on our damage. In order to do that, we made two changes.

First change: Instead of tanking him on the right, we placed Putricide closer to the middle where the pattern is. The orange ooze spawns, it locks on to a target and goes after them. If it happens to be a melee player, they still have plenty of time to hustle it and kite it around the room. Regardless, we cut the distance the melee had to travel to DPS the Ooze by half! They didn’t have to run as much. There was more DPS on the ooze meaning it died quicker which led to more DPS on the boss.

Second change: Instead of simply keeping Professor Putricide stationary, our Putricide tank was instructed to keep Putricide as close to the orange Ooze as possible. The reason? It allowed for incidental AoE attacks from melee to hit multiple targets. Chain Lightning would help. Divine Storm would help. Cleave, and the list goes on. The orange vials that the Professor drops wouldn’t be a problem since the entire melee group is constantly moving alongside the Professor and the orange Ooze anyway.

While it doesn’t seem like much, those two changes were enough to help put us over the top on our kill.

The lesson here is when working on a boss, try to set your tactics up in such a way that will cause the boss to take extra damage. Again, not every encounter will allow for this, but the possibility is there. Put those AoE strikes to maximum effect whenever it is feasible to do so.

This is from the perspective of one of our top mages. Look at how our tank gradually follows the orange ooze around. We have a set path to use when orange oozes are up that involve running toward the green wall, up to the table, then down the orange wall.

Also, excellent use of Invisibility during tear gas phases. Such cheater DPS!

If you look closely at the end of the fight, there’s about 6 or 7 players still alive. Yeah, we barely scraped by on this kill.

Last night, we managed to take down Sindragosa on 25. I want to stab my eyes out. We managed to get a video of it as well, so I’ll see if it can be placed up somewhere.

Yeah we’re having a hell of a time with phase 3 of this encounter. Last attempt was 2% and our offtank died thus healing the boss. We’re thinking about two healing the encounter (me, disc priest and a druid healer) to see if that one extra dps will close the gap between a wipe and 2% again. Great article as always 🙂 Thanks!
.-= radiophonic´s last blog ..Rotface Spanked =-.

@radiophonic: It’s certainly quite possible to 2 heal the fight. But the raid must be extremely diligent in avoiding Goo and stuff. Everyone needs to collapse onto the green ooze to distribute the damage as much as possible and so forth.

@Raesa – That’s how we do it. We tank the prof on the green spawn point with all the ranged with their backs to the table and in the table quadrant.

Then in P3 all ranged DPS stacks in the center on a single point. When the Malleable Goo is thrown we all strafe right, miss the goo and strafe left again, to minimize the ooze area, while Putricide is kited clockwise around the room.

Also, I didn’t know about invis working for the tear gas phase. I will give it a shot. I was wondering how spells were going off in the video.

And, yeah, Sindragosa was a real PITA, until we got the ice block formation down to a science. We use a trapezoid figure with assigned locations for each symbol. That was the only way we could keep from chain blocking.

LK, on the other hand (in 25) is way more of a dance than Heigan ever was, as far as I am concerned. We have only seen P3 once now. But, it was a clean entry into the phase and now we know we can get there. We should have him down in the next week or so.

@Tebla: I don’t know about the exact specifics, but it’s possible for Rogues to Vanish and Mages to hit invisibility at a certain point just before he phases over. It allows them to avoid the tear gas and still open on the boss.

@Matt: Yeah our rogues Vanish, but none of us invis (we will now) and there are three of us, usually. Good to know. Especially since we are rotating through new players every couple of weeks to get the quests done for the legendary. We have done two players and have two to go and that makes for a rough couple of wipes as they learn the new mechanics.

I believe the key to getting Vanish/Invis (especially Invis) is that you must phase out of the normal WoW plane of existance into the stealth function one, thus, it takes you out of combat just long enough to avoid the stun. The timing is roughly near the end of the tear gas cast.

Another good trick we have noticed for this encounter… The Aboms abilites are all seperate to the GCD, this means that while eating slime you can also attack the boss.

On all of our attempts and kills, we keep putricide near the Abom as long as possible, unless the goo is on the wrong side of the room compared to current ooze.. A player with a good connection etc can do upwards of 11kdps with the abom through the fight, whilst also keeping the ooze and adds well under control.

we do all the other usual tricks aswell.. mages using invis (we have a rogue shortage atm), melee/boss stacking under green ooze spawn point. Our major issue with this fight comes when we hit phase 3 and its mostly a dps issue now i fear.. the amount of 1/2/3% wipes ive seen recently is painful.. esp after every thing up to that point goes near perfectly.

so any tips for conquering phase 3?

** oh and a quick edit.. for mages at least, if you start your invis channel as soon as he casts tear gas, the timing works great, you fade to invis just before he throws the bomb, then remove the invis aura and you have X seconds of free dps.

@ Phase 3 Putricide
Hold off on heroism (I like to wait for one complete tank rotation, but…it depends). Use that haste to the advantage of your healers when the aura begins ticking harder halfway through. Losing people then means a huge cascade of deaths.
.-= Borsk´s last blog ..Blood Queen Lana’thel: Overbite Correction =-.

A couple of points that bothered me that could have been more clearly stated:

“We found a way to help resolve these issues and it’s nothing to do with player substitution or skill or gear. It was all due in part to our movement and positioning.”

Strategy implies skill. It couldn’t have been done without skill. We’re not talking about the skills of the world first guilds. This is the basic “don’t stand in the fire” type of skill. The people in question might not be strategists, coming up with the new strategies to solve the problems, but it requires skill to follow strategy effectively. Without the skill to follow the strategy, the best strategy in the world does you no good. For instance, if your “strategy” is for the tank to move the boss around but the tank isn’t good at moving a boss around such that they die from out-ranging the healers or turning their back to the boss, your strategy won’t work well. So in fact, your issue resolution had everything to do with skill.

Also, if I hand you a pie, would you say you have a whole pie? Or is that a part of a pie? Or is it all of part of the pie? That last one doesn’t make much sense, does it? It’s either all of the pie, or it’s a part of the pie, but not both at the same time.

So a better way to write that would be: “We found a way to resolve these issues and it had nothing to do with player substitution or gear. It was all due to an improved strategy regarding movement and positioning of the boss.”

We tank him (Putricide) near the top of the middle of the room (closest to the door with Putride still being near the center of the room) and then I move him left or right just a little to avoid the vials he drops.
Its working out well b/c the ranged got room to move if the ooze/cloud target them, and if its melee, then can run back and forth fast enough.
.-= VSUReaper´s last blog ..What’s your biggest regret in your WoW experience? =-.

So if I understand what you’re saying, you used the same skills, gear, and player arrangement you had before the strategy. It required those things to be in place before the strategy would work, but those things didn’t have to be changed along with the strategy.

Maybe this would be more accurate: “We found a way to resolve the issues that didn’t require player substitutions, weeks farming additional gear, or teaching new skills to our players.”

Meh, I’m probably just being nit-picky at this point. =P

I’m glad you guys got him down. We had to do the same thing with kiting the boss around near the gas cloud, but once we got through that, phase 3 hit us like a ton of bricks to the face. Fortunately it only took a few tries at that phase to hammer out what we needed to do.

2 healing putricitde is VERY possible. Last week I brought a 4450gs holy pally (4600 after the rental cloak) and a 5000 gs druid and we pulled this off. The tanks were on point, and we stacked on the green point,

Twohealing Putricide? Are we talking about 25man here? Because that seems a bit overboard. Correct me if I’m wrong. As for 10man, I would say it is the norm to twoheal it. At least we have never considered a need for 3 healers.

Epic

About me

My name is Matticus and this is my World of Warcraft blog. Here you can read about my thoughts regarding healing as a priest. As a former guild master, I also write about guild and raid related topics. The blog has expanded to include thoughts from other regular contributors. The aim of this blog is to help you grow and improve. My unending goal is to have something relevant and useful in every post. or more, you can check out my columns on Blizzard Watch. Visit theGuildmasters to talk shop with other GMs, raid leaders, and officers. My current guild is on Kel'Thuzad US.